I am still in Michigan, more than a little stunned by the missing day.

I had finished packing and cleaning up the guest cottage and went down to Mom’s library to print my boarding pass for the flight out and saw I had made the reservation for the 30th, not the 29th. The car was packed. The cottage locked up.

Jeeze. I began to mistrust everything I was doing. Am doing.

Suppose the Shamans were right?

There was plenty to fill up the missing day. Like why the Hospital had placed surveying stakes diagonally across the property, a line running only about a foot east of the cottage and right under the deck. There was a legal agreement signed years ago that gave the folks an easement on the driveway and over to the fence that demarcates the sprawling health complex from Dad’s compound and their’s; is it possible that the single largest employer in town is prepared to take on the debilitated former Mayor to increase their holdings?

This needs a trip to the County building to research the plat; worse, I think it may need a lawyer. This gets stranger and stranger- did I know that when I made the reservations?

The Odawa spirit Guide was named Eddie, and his companion- he never said she was his wife- was named Shary. They introduced themselves from the porch where I stood, looking up.

I told them I was Vic and I asked them how the Spirit Guide business was going.

They said it was fine.

I asked if business was up because of the recession, and Eddie said it was one of those counter-intuitive things. Hard times meant people were cutting back on a lot of things, but the uncertainty of the future made them seek the most prudent path ahead. Like the traffic at the casino next door, business was up.

I am a hard-headed practitioner of Realpolitick in my working life, and I have an acute bullshit-detector.

I have never talked to a fortune teller. Perhaps it was pure coincidence that my good pal in California had written about a seer she had encountered in the Indian Country of Oklahoma years before. She was a Stew then for the airlines, a glamorous line of work in the post-war world. On a lay-over, she and two companions sat down on a lark to hear the future history of their lives.

“It is funny,” she wrote, “to think that everything that old Indian told me turned out to be true.”

What the hell, I thought. Why not? This world seems poised on the edge of a razor, bright white like the full moon emerging from the darkening sky. All possibilities are open, all roads open.

I walked up on the porch and shook Eddie’s hand, and blew an air kiss over the back of Shary’s. The Old World courtesy always works for me, even if it is hokey as crap. Eddie gestured toward the storm door, and asked me to come in.

I surprised myself when I said “Yes.” I did not even check to ensure that my wallet was in the back-left pocket of my jeans.

There were four chairs and a little table in the small parlor of the house. Eddie took one of them and gestured me into a third. Shary offered me tea, and I nodded, though it was the time of day when I prefer something stronger. She disappeared into what must be the kitchen, and I admired her pert derriere as she left.

Discretely, I hoped, but Eddie was already explaining how he had gotten into the Spirit Guide business. I have been suspended in the limbo between life as I have come to know it and the world beyond since I have watched my father float off into it. I was prepared to listen to about anything.

Eddie had a prominent nose and pale blue eyes. His hair was a middle shade of brown, with gray interspersed, and fine wrinkles around his eyes made me realize he was older than he had appeared from the parking lot. Lean, he was, as if all the fat had been seared away in some intense flame.

As we waited for the water to boil, he explained that he was actually in the auto-parts business as a day job, and Shary was a TA at the local community college, specializing in American Indian studies. That is what had brought them to a consideration of animism, and the way of the Shaman.

My bullshit detector flickered, but I decided to suspend disbelief. People do what they do, and this was better entertainment than I could get in the guest cottage, and Dad had locked up the house for the night anyway. That alternative was to throw money at the slot machines in the casino, so why not. I concentrated on those pale eyes as Shary came back into the parlor with a tray and three steaming mugs of tea, whitened with milk.

Her hair was luxurious and dark without a hint of gray and her skin was the color of rich sweet caramel.

Sweet, too, I found when I sipped the tea. Honey?

Shary spoke for the first time. “I saw you in a dream last night.”

The bullshit detector went to full red. I was interested to see where this fantasy was going to go and I was going to keep sitting on my wallet.

“Why would you dream of me,” I asked. “We don’t know one another, and I don’t believe in fortune-tellers.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. Eddie nodded. “The way of the Shaman is just being on a path and seeing others who are walking along it. There was a dream, and Eddie and I took a shamanic journey this afternoon to see who walked with us. It was a man that looked like you.”

“We met our Spirit Guide on the path,” said Eddie. “She identified the man as someone who was from here and had returned in a time of crisis. He had a prior life. A White Guy on the Western Plains in the time after the Civil War. He may or may not have been US Army, I am not sure.”

He sipped his tea, eyes far away. Shary said “it was somewhere between Sheridan, Big Horn and Casper, Wyoming, and the path led between the Missouri River on the East and from the Canadian border down to the Platte river on the South.”

Weird, I thought. And getting weirder.

“My spirit guide told me that she knew the man and liked him from those times. She said it was possible to see further, since the Work that needed to be done could not be. The man was cloaked in chaos, and thirty colored layers of thin cloth.”

Eddie cleared his throat as I sat still as stone.

“It seems that the man had cloaked himself under many layers. We had to remove them all to get to him. But we did. We did the Work at a place that in this life is along the banks of the Little Missouri River in North Dakota. In the dream we danced with the Spirit Guide. It ended with us standing below Bear Butte.”

“And the nature of this Work you do is what?” I asked.

“Divining the path,” said Shary.

“How much does the roadmap cost?” I asked.

Eddie stiffened a bit. “No charge,” he said. I could tell I had offended him, and apologized. This is a matter of faith, I realized, and I had to be gentle.

The revelation had been delivered, and the tea was done. I thanked them for their courtesy, and for the entertainment and found my way out the door and back to the Caddie.

Back at the guest cottage I found the vodka and eventually a sleep that came with dreams.

It is purely coincidental that by noon the next day I had a contract on my condo back in Washington, and my younger boy had enlisted in the Navy and was maybe going off to war.

There is nothing to this Spirit crap, you know? Doesn’t make any sense at all. But I have this unbelievable feeling of lightness, like the rules of gravity have been suspended.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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